Abstract

The existence of extra-terrestrial oceans offers the opportunities to set examination questions for which students in underwater acoustics do not already know the answers. The limited set of scenarios in Earth’s oceans that can be presented to students as tractable examination questions means that, rather than properly assessing the individual scenario, students can rely on knowledge from previous examples in assessing, for example, which terms in equations are large and small, and what numerical values the answers are likely to take. The habit of adapting previous solutions with which the student is comfortable, to new scenarios, is not a safe approach to learn, as it ill equips the future scientist or engineer to identify and tackle problems which contain serious departures from their experience.